Facebook Starts Offering Coupons Through Facebook Offers

Facebook has long been trying to tie itself up businesses so as to make the social network a hub for business activity. It launched a few ventures in the past, some of which did fail. And now, Facebook has introduced another new feature by the name of ‘Facebook Offers.’ The feature basically lets you receive offers and discounts from local businesses which you can accept and then redeem.

Imagine you are the admin of a Facebook page which deals with a certain kind of business. You create a Facebook Offer which says ‘Buy a smartphone, get a bluetooth headset free.’ Now all the user will have to do is accept the offer which will then be sent over to the user’s Facebook email. The user can then print the offer or carry it with him/her to the retail facility of the specific business which pitched the offer. There, the user can redeem the offer.

Yes, it sounds a lot like coupons and that is what it is. Interestingly, though, Facebook is not charging anything for creating or accepting such offers on the social network. So it is indeed a good opportunity for businesses to make use of.

However, for now, the ability to make use of Facebook Offers is limited to certain business pages and certain kinds of businesses. You can think of it as a beta run of the feature. Facebook apparently hopes to get popular with smaller businesses with it and there’s every possibility that it may. Given the sheer amount of audience present on Facebook, local businesses can make a very good use of Facebook Offers to further their business. Nonetheless, the concern remains that will these coupons start spamming the users’ news feeds or what? The social network could do a lot better job if it could make these coupons targeted, so that users get to see only such coupons which may intrigue him/her.